


It Takes Up All My Time

by leupagus



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: AU, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-10
Updated: 2010-12-11
Packaged: 2017-10-13 14:50:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/138558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leupagus/pseuds/leupagus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>These bitches get shit done. Alternatively - an AU where the Governor's task force is comprised of a Naval Intelligence officer, a haole detective, a disgraced officer of the law, and Kono, who doesn't know what she did to get saddled with these crazy people.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Mua Loa

Steve doesn't bother coming home for the funeral -- "Something's come up," is what he says, on a staticky line.

"Something's always up, you -- _asshole_ ," Mary says, kicking at a locker. Meka flinches as he grabs his gun and holster out of his cubby and high-tails it out of there when Mary glares at him. The middle of HPD is not an ideal place to have a huge family blow-up, but what the hell. It's not like Dad's around to look disappointed in her anymore. "It's just -- it's _one day_ , you can't take time out of your fucking glamorous lifestyle in the Caribbean or wherever the fuck you are--"

"I'm in Beirut," Steve says. "The mishwe's pretty good, though."

And fuck him, because she bites back a smile. "Look, just... come home. One day. I know it's a haul but Dad would've wanted you here."

"To watch him get lowered into the ground in a box, right." There's a loud noise and men shouting; Steve sighs and says, "I'll see what I can do," and the line goes dead.

Three days later Mary takes the flag from the stone-faced soldier at her father's -- and mother's -- grave. There's a handful of old buddies, a bigger handful of cops; even the Governor, trying to stay inconspicuous despite the four bodyguards and three flunkies orbiting her. But Mary stands alone.

*

Catherine isn't expecting the call, and she takes a few seconds to answer; wherever Steve is, it's the middle of the night for _her_ , and she wants to make sure she conveys the proper amount of sleep-addled grogginess so he feels bad for waking her up.

"'Lo?" she says, and blinks. She wasn't even faking and she sounds like shit.

"Cath?" Steve says. "Hey," and the way he slurs that out tells her more about his drinking than the fact that he's actually calling her.

"What's up, sailor?" she says, shifting on her bunk so she's lying more comfortably on her back. She wonders absently if he wants to try phone sex again; last time they wound up laughing too hard to get anywhere, but the time before that had been pretty great. She misses him, in that distracted way that you only miss people when you remember to think about them; his massive hands, the way his eyebrows quirk up in the middle so that every time he's confused he looks like his forehead's trying to pitch a tent, his absent-minded sweetness.

"Not much. Oh. My dad died. Heart attack," he adds. "Fixing a _car_. That's ironic."

"Yeah," Catherine agrees, not sure why it's ironic.

"Yeah," Steve echoes, and she knows he's not really listening. "Mary told me. His service is tomorrow. It was nice talking to her. We don't talk much."

Cath bites her lip, because she has no idea who Mary is -- Steve's never been a sharing type of a guy. She wonders if his mom's still around, if he calls her Mary, which would be weird but pretty in character for Steve.

"Anyway, I just -- wanted to tell somebody. I guess," he says, some sort of awful laugh in his throat.

"Are you home?" she asks. "For the service?" It occurs to her that she doesn't even know where home is, for him.

This time Steve really does laugh.

*

It's still two weeks away from graduation; Kono slides into the waves and tries to block it out, but every time she pops up she gets sight of the shoreline and it trips her up, makes her wobbly on the board. A few times she even pearls into the water, which is humiliating beyond words, but the cove she's using has just a handful of surfers this morning, all of them kooks who're more worried about strangling themselves with their own leashes.

It's the fights with her mother and her uncle that've got her fucked up, she knows; they're still convinced that she's doing this for the wrong reasons, fighting the wrong fight. Chin's gone, they say, deserted them all for the mainland and a chance at a life not haunted by rumors and speculation -- and what if all his protestations and all his claims of innocence turn out to be for nothing?

"He's _fine_ where he is, and good riddance," her mother said, angry as she slapped her hands open-palmed on the table. Kono sought refuge and support from Kamekona, but he'd just shrugged and sighed and shaken his head.

"Why can't you ever leave things alone, Kona?" he asked.

"It's not about that," Kono told him, and it's true, but it's close enough to a lie to keep her off-balance for the morning. The Kellys, the Kalakauas, the Satous -- they're cops, the same way some families are lawyers or brewers or mechanics. It's in the blood, and Kono's promise to find out who framed Chin has something to do with her decision, but not enough for everyone to be so surprised and disapproving. Chin's the only one who's sent her a graduation gift.

When she heads home and showers off the sand and salt, she finds new scrapes and bruises along her thigh where she must've scraped up against the coral. She hadn't even noticed.

*

"So, a New Jersey resident with a Manchester accent," Hesse says, conversational.

Rachel looks up from where she's going over the arrest warrants one more time; the Carabinieri have a distressing tendency to combine zeal for the chase with disdain for paperwork, and if Victor Hesse is to stand trial for crimes against any country, let alone the seventeen that have currently brought charges against him and his brother, everything has to be perfect. "Pardon?" she says.

She shouldn't be speaking with the prisoner -- she shouldn't even be in the interrogation room with him. But she'd been the one to find him, to lead the team into the brothel, and although an Interpol agent is not permitted to make arrests, she's already fielded calls from the CIA, from MI6, from the Gen-Sec himself. When Hesse had told the Carabinieri chief that he would only talk to Agent Williams, it was almost a relief to get away from the telephone.

"Manchester," Hesse repeats. "It's a lovely house your mum's bought herself for her old age. I suppose your father leaving her that pile must've been a help. They were quite the love match, weren't they?"

Rachel feels her entire body grow cold. "Darren," she says loudly, "Please have someone pop 'round my mother's house, if you would be so kind."

There's a buzz of the intercom and Darren says, "Right, sending it now, sir. Ma'am."

Hesse looks disappointed. "You really think I would harm your dear old mum," he tsks.

"Would you?" Rachel actually finds herself amused at the idea. "Of course you would, Mr. Hesse. But you're a bit incapacitated at the moment."

"Ah, but where's my temperamental brother? That's what you're asking yourself right now." Hesse smiles wide and cheerful. "And you're quite right -- I have had to resort to crude hostage-taking. But your mother's safe, Detective, I promise you that."

"Why does that not reassure me?" Rachel asks, because she has to, because the Hesse brothers like to play games. That's how she caught Victor, it's how she'll catch Anton; they're obsessed with playing. With _winning_.

Just then, Rachel's mobile -- the pink old-fashioned one, the one whose number is not listed on any of her contact information, the one with clumsy stickers pasted on and "GRACE LOVES MOM" written on the back, the one that she's never without -- goes off.

"You should get that, love," Hesse says.


	2. Family

"It's not the heat that kills you," Ashleigh says at least once a week, when they're on deck and ostensibly on break and trying not to roast in the grueling, grinding sunshine of the Gulf.

"It's all the assholes with guns," Catherine agrees, and bums another cigarette.

*

Rachel loathes Hawaii -- all the more so because she knows she's supposed to love it. Everything's too easy here; the weather, the beaches, the people, it's all designed to be welcoming. She misses the bleakness of London and the aggression of New Jersey, even the boredom of her mother's home, all places with seasons and variations, horrible weather that made you grateful for the sun. And she is grateful, in a way, gratitude that sticks in her craw and makes her snappish and unpleasant.

The Newark SWAT team crashed into Danny's house and saved the day while she held the phone pressed to her ear, waiting for a gunshot or a scream and watching Victor watch her. A very anticlimatic end to a terrifying ten minutes, but those ten minutes were-- "Who is this asshole, Rachel?" Danny asked when Anton passed the phone to him. "He smells like patchouli, what's with that." She heard the sound of a fist hitting flesh and Gracie yelling.

It's probably very wrong to be proud of the fact that Gracie yelled and didn't cry.

Anton got back on the line and made grand threats and silky insinuations, and Rachel nodded and very calmly told Anton exactly how she would dismember him if he so much as touched her daughter. Anton laughed; Victor, watching, didn't. She bought enough time to allow SWAT to come cavalry-like to the rescue; there was a half-minute of scuffling and yelling, then Danny, breathless and fucked off and alive, saying, "I am so winning the divorce, if that's the kind of guy you're after these days."

She laughed, but she hasn't slept a full night since, running it through her mind, the edges smoothing into something dull and dreadful.

Danny and Grace are somewhere in the Midwest now, under the dubious protection of the FBI. Rachel and Danny had been a bizarrely united front, rejecting protection -- Danny is probably more horrified about living in Kansas or Minnesota than he is about living under an assumed name. All the Witness Protection people will tell her is that they'll all get their lives back once Anton Hesse is in custody.

"Catching Victor Hesse took five years," Rachel pointed out to the sixth blank-faced uniform who'd tried talking to her in soothing tones about the safety of her family. "And that was _with_ my assistance. Without it, you're comprehensively screwed."

"We have our best people working on this," and there was that calming tone again. Rachel remembered the time when Danny had thrown a chair after dealing with Internal Affairs for seven hours. She was starting to see the appeal.

" _I'm_ your best, and you're sending me to bloody _Fiji_ ," she pointed out.

"Honolulu, actually," was the reply.

*

Mary has to practically arm-wrestle Meka in order to get the Lowry case; in the end she shamelessly uses her father's name in vain, telling the chief that having a McGarrett on the case will mean something to the Governor. It won't, actually; Jameson may've come to the funeral but she didn't remember Mary's name when they talked at the wake, and doesn't that sum up her life. But the chief buys it and Meka flips her off good-naturedly, though he doesn't go so far as to offer to partner up for the case. There's only so far anybody at HPD will go, and Mary's got a tendency to either fuck or fuck over her partners. Usually both.

So she spends her day going over the evidence of the car, of the guy's kid and the guy's girlfriend, who's too teary and doesn't say her r's right for someone who's supposed to be from Maine. Mary watches her with Evan, but she can't decide if it's suspicious or if Natalie Reed's just dating Roland Lowry for his money. Judging by the size of his house, it's a good motivator.

She gets lucky when Max gives her a call a few hours later; a corpse has rolled in, gunshot wound to the shoulder, nothing special except he bled out on the roof of the hotel right next to the scene of the kidnapping. "And let me guess," Mary says, hopping onto an examination table; Max frowns but doesn't say anything. "You've got some program that triangulates criminal proximity or something and figured it was related to my case. Some people say it with flowers, Max. Or chocolate."

"What do they say?" Max asks.

The corpse has the New Belgrade Mafia tattoo on his hand, which Mary would've pegged as just a butt-ugly prison tat except for the guy she dated from Novi Sad a few years ago who turned out to be kind of a drug dealer; that along with the slushy r's convince Mary to take a second look at Miss Natalie Reed. The HPD database helps her exactly jack shit, which means she's got to reach out and touch somebody further afield.

She's ends up arguing with the most heinous bitch on Earth, some Interpol agent who sounds like she's got a crumpet stuck up her ass. "Inter-departmental cooperation does not mean handing out information to anyone who asks for it," she sighs, loud, right into the receiver. Mary flinches from the noise and pokes at the zen garden Duke had given her as a Christmas present last year. "We're an international investigative agency, not a charity."

"You make people pay for it, they might get resentful, Agent Williams," Mary says. "Look, I just want to know if the Nadia Lukovic in your database looks anything like the Natalie Reed in ours. It's not that big a deal -- just a little tit-for-tat."

"I've played that game, Detective," says Miss Horseface (Mary's got no proof of that, but it makes her feel better). "It rarely ends well." But she faxes over a really, really shitty xeroxed picture, and not even the black stripes along the nose and wiggly lines around the chin can obscure the fact that it's the same woman.

When Mary goes by the house to ask Natalie Reed-nee-Nadia Lukovic just a couple more questions, she's not totally shocked when the dozen or so uniforms she brought with her turn out to be kind of useful.

*

Kono's graduation is a mess, which she predicted; everyone piles into the auditorium, armed with flipcams and old camcorders -- Aunt Lili is showing off her new iPhone's camera feature -- and there's inevitably the moment where her mother realizes that her baby is all grown up now and starts sobbing.

Kono shakes the hands of a dozen captains as she progresses along the stage, wondering why she's so tired; why this doesn't feel like the start of anything, just another part of the confused middle that's been her life for the past eight years.

**Author's Note:**

> Abandoned WIP due to H50 as a show going spectacularly off the rails.


End file.
